‘Christ!’ Mathew careens away, with force enough that he trips. The packed snow is a hard landing, jarring an earthier curse. ‘What the…?’

The watching wolf grumbles, and Mathew scrabbles back. The ground numbs whatever it touches. His heels kick up white shards, but still he scrabbles, and still he stares, and still the eyes watch on.

Somehow, he’s in the mountains. Nothing grows here; nothing can. The motley three of them cluster in a central, powdered valley, and all around, on every side, are peaks. The wind whips, as it only does at dizzying altitude. The air is so cold it has flavour.

‘Stop.’ The large creature’s voice is quiet. A tug inside Mathew halts his scrabbling. His limbs burn while he wheezes, unfed and unfit, and the creature blinks its crinkled, sleepy eyes. ‘Thank you.’

Thank you? Mathew’s mind is madness. Never mind how he got here; what fresh hell is this?

‘It is not,’ the creature says. ‘And I do not believe you need to escape.’ It taps its weathered staff. ‘The minds inside you decided it would be best to depart.’

The wolf yips. Mathew glances at it. If anything, it looks amused. ‘What?’

‘The undead seem to be frightened of me.’ With a chuckle, the creature wrinkles its eyes. ‘I must say, it’s very wise. I would have torn them out of you and severed their claims to existence.’

High above, the wind moans. Powder eddies off the peaks. Mathew tries to seize his breath. ‘Whatever that means,’ he gasps, ‘it’s not comforting.’ He runs a hand down his face, three rapid times. A scrubby beard is taking hold; he’s never grown one in his life. ‘Christ.’

Blinking hard, he pictures a cord. It’s how he taught his daughters to lift from a dream: find the cord, follow it, and wake up in your bed. He’ll lift. He’ll drift. He’ll wake to sense.

The cord disintegrates. The snow soaking his gloves is real. The wild smell of the wolf is real. He can’t lift. He can’t drift.

‘Everything is real.’ The creature taps its staff again. ‘As real’—it rumbles another chuckle—‘as you are truly observant. You do not, however, understand where you are.’

It’s more of a curious fact than a query. Mathew looks around him, flit, flit, flit. Snow. Sky. Wolf. Thing. Glaciers and chasms and visible wind. ‘Should I?’ he asks, disquieted. He feels like a lost little boy.

‘No.’ The creature’s eyes unfocus, before sharpening like a lens. ‘The leeches used you, and spat you out. You’ve had no thought of your own in…’ It tilts its head toward the wolf. Watching Mathew, it doesn’t blink. Its yellow eyes are thoughtful. ‘A year.’

‘A year?’ Mathew scoffs at once.

The creature meets his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Why?’

Mathew’s derision stutters. ‘Why? Because…’

Because…because what? He strains, but his mind is chalk, wiped clean from the board. Where he is, why he’s alone, who or what is in front of him; there isn’t so much as a smudge. He struggles through the nothing like a swimmer in a dream. Thinking is harder than punching a wall, and his knuckles are bloody. Does he know himself?

Mathew McFadden. It drips in droplets, beads of rain, but concern swamps relief. Concern that he had to forage, and it wasn’t just there to be found.

But at least he did forage, and it was there when he looked. He’s Mathew McFadden, forty-seven. His wife is Anna. His daughters, Kira and Romy, are eighteen and sixteen. He doesn’t smoke, has never smoked, yet reeks of cigarettes. The last thing he remembers is—

‘A year ago,’ the creature says.

Mathew starts. How…?

‘And,’ it continues, ‘I’d be much obliged if you’d slightly alter your thinking. Consider me less of a creature, and more of a nebulous spirit. I am not a spirit, either, but I prefer the touch of whimsy.’

Mathew’s brain chugs in silence. The creature—the nebulous spirit—the esoteric giant—is probably right; it’s not a creature in the sense of a beast, but how else was he meant to see it? Its head is a chiselled, wizened man, wide at the cheekbones and narrow at the chin; its eyes glint green, dug in a skull with plastered, greying hair. The thin, elongated body is shaggy and mostly bare, and a brown tunic hangs over feet to crush a house. They’re truly, madly, deeply incongruent, and when you have a body that dwarfs a swarthy wolf, that’s truly, madly, deeply saying—

Before his eyes, the creature—giant—man begins to change. It’s as if he looked away, for a finely spliced second, and a ghost slipped peripherally by; in a blended blur of movement that he doesn’t quite catch, the creature is suddenly not.

A nebulous spirit. He’s close to human.

Mathew’s mind bends back.